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EFF Begins Investigating Surveillance Technology Rumors At Standing Rock (eff.org)
Electronic Frontier Foundation has dispatched a team of technologists and lawyers to a protest site in Standing Rock, North Dakota, to investigate "several reports of potentially unlawful surveillance." An anonymous reader writes:
The EFF has "collected anecdotal evidence from water protectors about suspicious cell phone behavior, including uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely," according to a recent report. "Some water protectors also saw suspicious login attempts to their Google accounts from IP addresses originating from North Dakota's Information & Technology Department. On social media, many reported Facebook posts and messenger threads disappearing, as well as Facebook Live uploads failing to upload or, once uploaded, disappearing completely."
The EFF reports "it's been very difficult to pinpoint the true cause or causes," but they've targeted over 20 law enforcement agencies with public records requests, noting that "Of the 15 local and state agencies that have responded, 13 deny having any record at all of cell site simulator use, and two agencies -- Morton County and the North Dakota State Highway Patrol (the two agencies most visible on the ground) -- claim that they can't release records in the interest of "public safety"...
"Law enforcement agencies should not be allowed to sidestep public inquiry into the surveillance technologies they're using," EFF writes, "especially when citizens' constitutional rights are at stake... It is past time for the Department of Justice to investigate the scope of law enforcement's digital surveillance at Standing Rock and its consequences for civil liberties and freedoms in the digital world."
The EFF reports "it's been very difficult to pinpoint the true cause or causes," but they've targeted over 20 law enforcement agencies with public records requests, noting that "Of the 15 local and state agencies that have responded, 13 deny having any record at all of cell site simulator use, and two agencies -- Morton County and the North Dakota State Highway Patrol (the two agencies most visible on the ground) -- claim that they can't release records in the interest of "public safety"...
"Law enforcement agencies should not be allowed to sidestep public inquiry into the surveillance technologies they're using," EFF writes, "especially when citizens' constitutional rights are at stake... It is past time for the Department of Justice to investigate the scope of law enforcement's digital surveillance at Standing Rock and its consequences for civil liberties and freedoms in the digital world."
The police seem to think they have limitless powers, it is disgusting. They were given extra powers to deal with the likes of ISIS, not for repressing peaceful protestors. They need to learn they work for the people and not a few company owners.
By now it should be public knowledge for any protester against any government that their personal communication devices and the communication itself will be always under attack. Whoever goes to such protests and especially anyone who is networking with others about it, needs to encrypt all devices and all communications. Not just at the protest itself but in their private life too. One is always under threat to get arrested. If one is arrested the cellphone is the first thing confiscated and of course tried to access. Any US protester who uses US communication services like google, whatsapp, facebook for anything is simply a dumb fool. How many NSLs have been granted wrt Standing Rock already?
Governments infiltrated protest movements 50 years ago with COINTELPRO including assaults on people, did the same in the 90s cross border in Europe, fathered children with activists even and now of course will attack all communications, in meatspace and online. Attacking communications is the first step since it's easy: they own the means of communication. Google hast to comply, since it's the law. They didn't change the amount of effort they will go to, they just changed their tactics. The amount of effort is comparable to spies going deep undercover, to live whole lives over decades to infiltrate, so eavesdropping on communication is a very small and minor step.
Please call them protesters or demonstrators. Calling them water protectors is biased toward the protesters just as calling them dissidents or terrorists would be biased toward the pipeline supporters. The story itself is interesting and is news for nerds. I do want to hear about technology and possible indications (such as battery drain rate) that surveillance is occurring. I would prefer that the summary is not politically biased as I can make my own opinion as to if the pipeline is a good thing or a bad thing.
I know it is a pipe dream, but could we please get back to being a news (for nerds) site and not a political discourse site?
Battery drain can be because of incorrectly configured hotspots. No doubt anyone who is in the same place all the time could spot a "stingray" - a cell tower that appears and disappears. So they could look for some obvious possibilities,
Disappearing Facebook posts? Is their password that bad, or are they posting content that could be subject to DMCA takedown? Otherwise I'm not sure FB would cooperate.
one of the protestors lost an arm to one. The police dropped the grenade too close to them and the shrapnel shredded her arm. It's still attached, but it doesn't work. The best part? The only reason she's gonna win her lawsuit is that the doctor who treated her was smart enough to save the shrapnel lodged in her arm so it could be presented as evidence. The police chief was already accusing the protestors of throwing the grenade until he found out they had proof.
Anyway, this is why you don't militarize the police. They don't have the training to use these kinds of weapons even when they're 'non-lethal'...
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Battery life is lower in remote areas with poor cell coverage for a number of reasons. The radios in the phones transmit at the lowest power needed to maintain a connection. Out in the boonies where the cell towers are just barely in range the phone has to use the maximum wattage which kills the battery. Data rates are usually lower as well (1X or maybe 3G)., which results in longer transmission times to send and receive data, which again kills the battery. So the battery part is no surprise to me. Poor and intermittent data connectivity can also result in applications freezing, and I had at least one older Android phone that would lock up and crash if cell service kept dropping in and out over and over. When riding in the mountains I'd have to just turn it off and only power up to use it when I needed it.
I'm certainly not saying they aren't being monitored or hacked or whatever, but a number of the things they are reporting are normal to those of us who are often out in the country where cell service is marginal.
Better known as 318230.
Good way to contribute something to all for the holiday season.
Sure....
And then you have bad weather and the LEOs can't fly their drones and suddenly the network works.
--
BMO
A large number of the "protestors" at standing rock are earning a wage for it. They're not protestors, they're employees.
Do you know this or are you repeating something you read on the internet?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The only reason she's gonna win her lawsuit is that the doctor who treated her was smart enough to save the shrapnel lodged in her arm
Citation needed; there's so much fake news going around on this topic you can't believe everything you hear. I couldn't find any reports of shrapnel from a grenade being the cause. However, there is a report of a young woman being injured by a homemade bomb. I also found reports that the FBI collected bits of flesh from one of the propane canister bombs, so someone was injured by it.
For the facts, see this comment:
https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
Not only did a protestor *not* lose an arm to a grenade, but you've lost all your credibility in this conversation due to believing fake news.
As others have pointed out, cell towers are few and far between in the Dakotas. When the dropped connections, battery drain, and phone crashing stops, then you'll know they've brought in the Stingray. It'll be much closer to the protesters, and provide a much more reliable signal.
The Facebook login attempts are happening the old-fashioned way, from protesters being identified by taking a photo with a zoom lens, running it through the FBI's gigantic facial recognition database, and then Googling the result. The login attempt is definitely an unconstitutional search attempt. The facial recognition database and its usage... might not be. With the Supreme Court we have had and are going to have, it's not.
Probably no Stingray though. At least not yet.
The police claimed it was a propane tank based IED, but the fragments the surgeon preserved from her arm were from a concussion grenade.
Funny thing about the pictures of disposable bottles in your second link, they're not in fragments. Some appear to have been tossed in a campfire.
"uncharacteristically fast battery drainage, applications freezing, and phones crashing completely"
This has been an much under-reported problem with the latest upgrade to iOS 10.1.
Likely a bug in the upgrade is responsible at least in iOS....
It seems like there is very little posted on it.
Here is the section in apple discussions:
https://discussions.apple.com/...
Forbes reported on the issue and then has reported again about the latest 10.2 upgrade making the problem worse.
Here is a report in Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...
Little acknowledgement from Apple thus far.
You mean you believe any horseshit the cops will throw at you, and they've thrown a lot this year. Same sheriffs department has on its most wanted list a person who disarmed an agent provocateur, not the agent who was assaulting people (pointing his AR-15).
But that's okay, just to let you know we're all friends here, I actually own some oceanfront property near the Standing Rock reservation, which I'm willing to sell you at a cut rate....
Very well then:
http://www.valleynewslive.com/content/misc/NoDALP-Protesters-Getting-Paid---Is-This-Proof--401507625.html
Now, get back to earning your paycheque. I thought the internet wasn't working at Standing Rock?
I hope you were yelling those words at the nearest mirror when writing them.
Uh, NO. They are literally trying to protect their watershed, thus making "water protectors" just as reasonable as calling the oil supporters "security contractors".
Um, no. The EFF's official style is to refer to themselves as "Electronic Frontier Foundation." You can see this several times in the article.
"EFF has been tracking the effects of its surveillance technologies on water protectors’ communications and movement."
"EFF sent technologists and lawyers to North Dakota to investigate."
"EFF also sent more than 20 public records requests to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies."
It's a well known fact that this entire "protest" is a diversion by the MSM to help Hitlery Clinton and Bernie Schindler... something something ...communism? And something about children with sex rings eating pizza? I mean, we all know pizza and finger jewellery are liberal conspiracies designed to turn kids gay. Then they'll be brainwashed into aborting their grandparents so the left wing Nazis win World War 2.
Ahh, so you are crazy, misinformed and believing political lies on the internetz.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
We've got between 2 and 7 generations of CPUs with potential 'spyware' built in. ARM, Intel, AMD. While I still haven't heard of any documented example of it being used in practice, I also haven't heard of anybody setting up reciever hardware to snoop on their cellphone's cellular traffic patterns and determine if suspicious transmission patterns are happening that might indicate keys, baseband/management processor level spyware is being uploaded.
The point being: There is a lot more needed to retain any right of privacy now and into the future than is currently being invested today, and unless it happens soon there will be little or no opportunity to recover the loss of technological freedom, even if 'legal freedom' is still farcially enshrined in documents/the law.
I'm not the AC above who first claimed they were employees... also I'd thought things like me saying "something something... communism?", my incredibly wrong interpretation of the already nonsense "pizzagate" allegations, my assertion that pizza and jewellery rings were liberal conspiracies, and my hypothesis that these brainwashed children would somehow be able to retroactively abort their grandparents to change the outcome of World War 2 would've been a slight hint I was joking :) If you actually believed I thought that though I'll think no less of you, as it's becoming depressingly easy to unintentionally Poe even smart people on the internet lately. And I do apologise if my sense of humour wasn't to your taste, I'm British and grew up with the magnificent Chris Morris shaping what I found funny :D
You could try finding some actually-credible sources...
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
If the surgeon served during wartime, he might need to know enough to deal with unexploded ordinance. However, more likely the surgeon just kept the fragments so they could be examined by an expert.
1) Nobody has produced any evidence that a concussion grenade was used, or that the police even had them
2) Concussion grenades are designed to stun and scare the crap out of people, but not injure them. More like a very loud firecracker.
Perhaps you should read up on the story a bit.
If EFF shows that whatever was done was illegal, there will be a bill flying through congress soon enough to make it legal - and backdating so that the police last week did not do wrong.
I'm over 50. I'm living in the world I read about in SF when I was a kid. Warning: it's a scary place.
Had you politely asked, I might have bothered. Since you decided to lead by calling me a liar, FOAD.
Let Google be your guide.
Still waiting for a polite request.
Pretty please would you provide a link(s) to article(s) stating a surgeon retrieved and saved concussion grenade fragments from that woman's arm. I googled. My skills were inadequate.
Would it really be that hard to ask politely? I guess it might make your liver claw it's way out through your belly button or something.
<PLONK>
Its not the feds/locals.
Private companies use tech to do the monitoring, then sell the info to the feds.
Feds never do it. Constitution is not violated.
Flashbangs can indeed injure people, and they are regularly used against protesters.
I'm guessing the protesters called them concussion grenades because that is a good description, though it means something else.
The video from the snopes article on the subject shows flashbangs being used against the crowd at about 1:13.
http://www.snopes.com/2016/11/...
(The article doesn't indicate whether or not the accusations or rebuttals are true)
OK. Here's a few.
On the other side, we have some pictures of clearly in-tact disposable propane bottles and nothing that could even potentially explode one. It's actually pretty hard to make such a container burst and without a strong oxidizer, good luck getting the gas to actually burn.
OK
Assuming the article you linked to is true, that's a very interesting development. One I'd personally support, actually. The screenshotted Craigslist post however is hardly "You'll be rich beyond the dreams of avarice" and is more "If you join this protest fulltime, we can give you a bit of cash to subsist on". The rest of the article appears to be fairly baseless speculation that this protest is purely an attempted moneygrab because A) the tribe once received a sizeable settlement from the federal government that they've now spent, except actually once divided amongst the tribe it wasn't a particularly big amount, and B) the tribe is facing a budget deficit that's even more insignificant if divided amongst all their members. So, amongst some downtrodden poor people, one guy allegedly cashed in his 401k in order to pay protesters who quit their job to protest full time a small amount to live on - which seems to include people who'd already done that - and then aspersions are cast on the entire tribe because they're poor and because they once got a modest amount of cash from the government as compensation for being screwed over by federal mismanagement of tribal trust lands. To me this article reads like a spurious, transparent attempt to generate scandal out of poor people looking out for each other.
1. Psst, the Morton County Most Wanted List is publicly available on the internet. Brennon Nastacio isn't on it. Let Google be your friend. There *is* an arrest warrant for him though because he approached a man who has a legal right to carry a firearm, threatening him with a knife.
2. Re Kyle Thompson: protesters shot flare guns at him, rammed his truck and then burned it. Certainly his truck was rammed and burned. It's just a matter of who did it.
Take a deep breath, and expose yourself to facts. Realize that it's okay for you to have been completely wrong about something once in a while.
If the new definition of terrorist is that anyone is one who dares to disagree with government overstepping the privileges it was granted to better serve its citizens, then yes, I'm a terrorist. Put the label on the pile over there, I'll ignore later.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Holy...! This runs so much deeper than anyone thought.
Gotta retweet it instantly! We have confirmation!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sources? What's that "sources" you're talking about, get the news out while it's hot, nobody gives a shit about "sources".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Folks? Nobody, really, NOBODY gives a shit.
Either people have made up their mind about it by now. Then they have taken a side in that "battle". And no kind of evidence, real or fabricated, will sway them. They will believe whatever side they chose and will consider anything offered from the other side as propaganda.
Or they have not made up their mind about it by now. If so, then only because of apathy because they don't give a shit about which side is "right".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is, however, a signed statement from medical personnel who actually witnessed the dangerous mis-use of grenades and treated her on-scene (you did look at the signatures, didn't you)? As for 2, look at all of the pictures and then consider what a device like the one pictured might do if it burst while in contact with your arm.
You clearly have chosen to trust the unsubstantiated statement of law enforcement. I provided several documents where a fair number of people say otherwise. At least the pictures in my links show something that could plausibly cause such a nasty injury. You are making the mistake of the creationists, assuming the slightest uncertainty in the opposing theory is iron clad proof of your own.
Yes, because if it was actually a flashbang that was deliberately thrown AT someone, that would totally let law enforcement off the hook.
The one thing in common for all of those is that they cause grievous bodily harm if they go off while in contact with a person.
So if you prefer, read it as an explosive of some kind.
Then consider that a gun loaded with blanks is lethal at close range.
Yeah, retweet to stick it to the man! And by "man", I of course mean "Illuminati space lizard".
Your elevator doesn't go to the top floor, does it? There hasn't been any snow here this week. Therefore, it did not snow last week.
Riiiiiiiight. A literal agent provocateur, trying to pose as an AR-15 carrying protestor has so much credibility. In addition to the aforementioned oceanfront property, I suddenly must unload my shares in North Dakota's professional football team. Just gimme your credit card number and we can discuss prices.
At the same time, we have the opposing story that shows us a few common and obviously un-ruptured and un-modified empty propane cylinders but would have us believe that the so far non-violent protesters decided to be terrorists for a night and somehow accomplished the difficult task of getting propane cylinders to explode (it's REALLY not that easy to so) yet left no ruptured cylinders to be found.
They even went so far as to claim that a burned but in-tact cylinder was somehow involved (What, did the protesters weld it back together seamlessly afterwards) because they found what they think are bits of skin on it? That strikes me as a bit desperate.
I'm a bit more inclined to believe the explody thing came from the people who brought explody things and body armor with them.
Read the reply to the thread starter.
But you have not shown in the slightest that a surgeon has recovered grenade fragments from the woman's arm. Please stop parroting that claim and Gish Galloping to other factoids and theories when called on it.
The claim is actually better substantiated than the one I was countering and the surrounding evidence lends it support.
End of the day, even if we fly there and convince the surgeon to show us the fragments, we will still be relying on his word that they came from the patient. That's life. We have to make the best judgement based on what we can get. That often involves making a judgement call about who to believe. In turn, that calls for looking at whose story best fits the facts available.
I have presented the victim's report, the father's report, and reports from medical personnel on site. If that's not enough, too bad. I don't have a tardis so I can't take you back to witness the event in person.
On a side note, according to Snopes, the Morton County Sheriff's Department has removed their posting where they claimed that she was injured by an IED rather than a grenade.
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